What Can I Do If I Have Broken Phone Buttons

Modern smartphones with the big touchscreens have way fewer buttons than the devices of the past. However, these few buttons are more or less essential, and if even one of them breaks, we can have serious trouble with the use of our device. Let's see what we can do if we have broken phone buttons. Should we try to fix them or find alternative methods to use our phone?

Unblock any international website, browse anonymously, and download movies and Mp3 with complete safety with CyberGhost, just for $2.75 per month:

How to fix broken phone buttons

As we saw in a previous article, we can make an old phone feel like new. But in any case, our device's buttons should function as they were intended.

If they don't, we can attempt to fix the broken phone buttons.

Cleaning the button and its frame

To clean a button, we only need a Q-tip with a small amount of isopropyl alcohol or pure alcohol.

We wet the Q-tip, so it's a bit damp, but not dripping.

Then, we can clean thoroughly around the button, making sure no liquid drips inside the phone. In the image, we can see an example from the back side of a device.

Ignore the glorious glitter nail polish.

We can apply the same method to any other physical button on our device. We press a few times the button to remove any dirt and repeat the process.

When we clean the button, we must also clean the surrounding frame. In general, it's quite hard to reach the inside of a button. That's why we need to press bottom it down, but also be careful not to cause any damage.

By pressing the button, we will see the surrounding frame. We clean the area and then push from the other side to clean the spot where our finger initially was.

Yes, we are pointing straight at it, but please ignore it. It is glorious, though.

Compressed air cleaning

For this method, we need a bottle of compressed air, the ones we usually use for cleaning our keyboard.

Locking our screen

A smaller challenge is to lock our screen without buttons. There are several apps to help us with that.

We suggest the Lock Device Widget, which is small, lightweight, and you can set it to be completely transparent.

One more way to lock the screen is by gestures we can find on various launchers. For example, Nova Launcher can be set so, when we double tap our screen, it will lock it.

Change the volume

On Play Store we will find many collections of widgets, that can offer us instant access to various settings of our device.

If the volume buttons don't work, with a simple search we can easily find widgets of our liking to set the loudness of our phone.

Taking screenshots

All modern smartphones can take screenshots with a button combination, usually power+volume down. Of course, as you can imagine, something like that isn't going to be possible if we have broken phone buttons.

Thankfully for us, various apps make this possible without using any buttons. Also, some manufacturers offer a shortcut to take a screenshot from the notification area.

Shut down and Recovery Mode

Last but not least, is shutting our phone down or booting on recovery mode.

The reasons why we might want to shut down our device or gain access to Recovery Mode are plenty.

Some apps shut down our device, reboot it, or set it to Recovery Mode.

These apps might or might not need our phone to be rooted.

Do you have broken phone buttons?

Did you even use your phone while its buttons were broken? Did you find our advice helpful? Do you know any other ways to use a smartphone without buttons?

Tell us in the comments your experience with the broken phone buttons.

Support PCsteps

Do you want to support PCsteps, so we can post high quality articles throughout the week?

About Haris Anagnostopoulos

Haris Anagnostopoulos is a technology nerd since he was born.
He is a perfectionist, cocky and has OCD.
He recycles bags and everything that comes to his way.
"If you have humor laugh and if you have curiosity search"